How the Brain Builds Reality
Explore how neural circuitry actively synthesizes your perception, memories, and attention. Move beyond pop-psychology myths into the predictive mechanics and functional networks of the working brain.
Like Duolingo, but for How the Brain Builds Reality. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Constructing Daily Perception and Modifying Internal Blueprints. It assumes you already know the basics.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in How the Brain Builds Reality
- Higher cortical areas send predictive hypotheses down to sensory cortices.
- Sensory organs only need to transmit unexpected signals rather than full scenes.
- The difference between prediction and input generates an error that updates the model.
- Accurately predicted sensations cancel out early in sensory hierarchies.
- Ascending prediction errors recruit conscious attention to update mental states.
- Precision weighting selectively amplifies informative surprises over predictable noise.
- Optical illusions occur in cortical processing networks, not retinal receptors.
- A lifetime prior that faces are convex overrides genuine depth stereopsis cues.
- Perceptual illusions reflect optimal Bayesian inference resolving ambiguous scenes.
- Hallucinations happen when top-down expectations are weighted too heavily over sensory evidence.
- Sensory hypersensitivity in autism can stem from failure to attenuate low-level prediction errors.
- Semantic cues provide a high-level prior that reinterprets degraded sensory input.
- The physical acoustic waveform reaching the cochlea remains completely identical.
- Top-down priors constrain how lower auditory areas resolve ambiguous acoustic tokens.
- Complex cognition emerges from synchrony across distributed functional brain circuits
- Classic localized brain centers interact dynamically rather than working as independent modules
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives How the Brain Builds Reality the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
To save energy and processing power, what do your sensory pathways transmit back up to the brain?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where How the Brain Builds Reality takes you
- 1
Constructing Daily Perception
- Predictive Processing: How Expectations Shape Sensation
- Network Dynamics: Directing the Brain's Gatekeepers
- 2
Modifying Internal Blueprints
- Memory Reconsolidation: Updating the Recorded Past
- Neuromodulatory Tuning: Navigating Global Brain States
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
How the Brain Builds Reality is taught in the The Professor style: clear, structured, thorough. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
More Psychology on Tomo
The Architecture of the Mind
Move beyond basic definitions to understand the hidden mechanisms of human behavior, from how we construct reality to why we make irrational social choices.
The Psychology of Everyday Behavior
Discover why you think, react, and decide the way you do. Learn the core principles of cognitive and social psychology to read human behavior with clarity.
Everyday Psychology
Discover why you make irrational choices, misremember yesterday's events, and copy the crowd. Learn the core principles behind daily human behavior through relatable, real-world examples.
Why We Do What We Do
Discover the hidden psychological forces driving everyday human choices. Spot your brain's invisible mental shortcuts, decode the power of social pressure, and understand what really guides human behavior.
The Mechanics of the Human Mind
Move beyond the basics of behavior to understand the hidden cognitive structures, social pressures, and neurological patterns that drive human action.
Why We Do What We Do
Uncover the hidden logic behind your daily choices and learn how to outsmart your own brain's shortcuts.
Start How the Brain Builds Reality today.
Download Tomo, search How the Brain Builds Reality, and play your first lesson in under a minute.